The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A year or more ago my glass biz website went dark. Just disappeared from the planet and from the internet and probably from reality itself. Gone, all that work of putting together the thing, poof! If you’re trying to compete for art projects, you really need to have that website showing your past work. Not much getting around it, even for a Luddite like myself. Sure, I ranted, I raved, I threw myself on the floor and pounded the living daylights out of the rug. All, of course, to no avail. The gods of technology, in case you didn’t know, have no ears. They are a little bizzy building a world without compassion.

Turns out the website was hosted by a company with a cute name. Small Orange. Or Tangerine. Something citrus. And when we contacted them, the nice lady with a foreign accent nearly undecipherable explained the last bill had not been paid and so, without so much as a warning, they dropped our account. Which might not have been so bad … except they also deleted all the data, the photos, the entire enchilada and none of it saved or retrievable. Thanks, guyz! Thanks for nada, literally!

So after spitting nails for a week I taught myself web design, spent two more weeks in trial and error mode but finally built a website that was updated and even nicer than the one we lost. Ha! Take that, techie jerks! Mark one up for the stupid human. And stick it up your Elon Musk while you’re at it!

Course two days ago I checked on that website only to find it had been replaced with some strange other site under my domain name archibaldglass.com, nothing whatsoever to do with me or with glass, but nevertheless living and breathing in the vast world of the internet under my aegis. You cannot imagine the rage that boiled under my battered hat for the past couple of days trying to fathom what had caused this to happen. Probably, like myself, you cannot imagine the inner workings of the internet itself, its domain name companies, the servers, the cable companies, the hosts, all those interconnected bits and bytes, the buzzing of bizzy electrons, the algorithms, the inscrutable technologies.

I’m currently playing Sherlock with no clues. My website may have been hacked. My domain name may have been sold. My week has definitely been ruined. What I know is that I live in a more complicated world than I asked for. One controlled by Tech Boyz who live on the farther end of the spectrum than where I live. And now I have to journey into their world, without sword or prayer, without much hope, with only my analog wits to help me. It don’t look promising.

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